Sports Books in Brief

Perhaps no other sport has undergone so much change in the last 30 years as tennis. Up until the late 1960's, the best players in the world would happily travel to tournaments in hick towns for a few hundred dollars a match, double up in motel rooms and do their own laundry; today each player in the top 10 is a young millionaire, coddled by sponsors and promoters, surrounded by an entourage of specialist coaches, managers and sports psychologists, not to mention parents and hangers-on. Gordon Forbes, the author of the genial tennis memoir ''A Handful of Summers,'' has seen it all. A member of the South African Davis Cup team in the 50's and 60's, Mr. Forbes played on the international circuit with moderate success, retired and spent more than 20 years in the lighting fixture business, then rejoined the tennis world as a journalist and manager. In ''Too Soon to Panic,'' he tells anecdotes about life on the tour back in the informal, low-rent days; reminisces about youthful evenings spent tipping back beers with buddies like Lew Hoad, Pancho Segura, Roy Emerson, Cliff Drysdale and Arthur Ashe; and discusses the new high-tech and high-power games of modern superstars like Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf. Not all his stories are equally amusing, and he too frequently quotes his doubles partner and fellow cutup, Abe Segal, who is not nearly as witty as Mr. Forbes seems to think. Still, the book should be a pleasure for fans of old-time tennis. Mr. Forbes makes us acknowledge that however finely honed and conditioned the players are, and however technically perfect, tennis is ultimately a mind game. Brooke Allen

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A version of this review appears in print on June 8, 1997, on Page 7007024 of the National edition with the headline: Sports Books in Brief. Today's Paper|Subscribe